Peter L. W. Osnos was born in Bom­bay (now Mum­bai) India on Octo­ber 13, 1943. He arrived in Los Ange­les by ship with his par­ents and broth­er in Feb­ru­ary 1944. He was raised in New York and attend­ed high school in Con­necti­cut, col­lege at Bran­deis Uni­ver­si­ty in Waltham, Mass­a­chu­setts, and grad­u­ate school at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty. He worked as an assis­tant to the jour­nal­ist I.F. Stone and joined the Wash­ing­ton Post in 1966. At the Post, Osnos served as a cor­re­spon­dent in Viet­nam, the Sovi­et Union, and Lon­don. He was also the nation­al and for­eign edi­tor. In 1984, Osnos joined Ran­dom House as a senior edi­tor and lat­er asso­ciate pub­lish­er as well as pub­lish­er of the Times Books imprint. In 1997, he found­ed Pub­li­cAf­fairs in part­ner­ship with the Perseus Books Group and served as pub­lish­er and edi­tor at large until 2020. He was the founder of the Car­a­van Project on the devel­op­ment of dig­i­tal and audio pub­lish­ing, author of a week­ly media col­umn called Plat­form which was host­ed by the Cen­tu­ry Foun­da­tion and appeared on the​at​lantic​.com and in 2020, launched Plat­form Books LLC with his wife, Susan Sher­er Osnos. The first book will be ​“An Espe­cial­ly Good View: Watch­ing His­to­ry Hap­pen” to be released in June, 2021. It is Osnos’ mem­oir to be dis­trib­uted by Two Rivers/​Ingram. He is the father of two chil­dren, Evan Osnos and Kather­ine San­ford, and grand­fa­ther of five. He and his wife now live in New York City and Lake­side, Michigan.